The coloniality of gender expertise in professional environment and development contexts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As international environmental research for development organizations and their funders continue to build a requirement to 'mainstream' gender equality into their programming, disquiet surrounding gender expertise has emerged among those who bring reflections from feminist political ecology into professional development contexts. The perspective offered here builds from our earlier exploration alongside 'gender experts' of the uneasy navigation of epistemic and practical dilemmas necessary in environmental research-for-environment and development (R4ED) settings in the Global South. We consider the deeper trouble that comes from the embedding (and shaping) of gender expertise within the colonial project of development. Earlier postcolonial feminisms have demonstrated the difficulty in dislodging a hegemonic gaze on the "Third World woman", that has aligned a particular kind of feminism with international development's "civilizing mission." We suggest that gender expertise in professional environment and development contexts may be subsumed in the neutrality and universality of Eurocentric scientific knowledge, which has the effect of marginalizing non-Western perspectives and indigenous ways of knowing. Thus, the 'technocratization' of gender expertise for managerial purposes depoliticizes and blunts the potential for achieving the goals of social justice. We show how these issues take particular form in technical settings, where knowledge hierarchies, funding models and everyday exchanges may be shaped by coloniality. We argue that this amplifies the coloniality of gender, narrowing transformative agendas to those based around individualized entrepreneurial freedom, crowding out the generative and care-full possibilities offered from a plurality of contextualized and situated ecological feminisms. We conclude by considering "openings" in gender transformative thinking and action ('praxis') as waymarks for those navigating the complex ethics and politics inherent in professional feminist political ecology, built around the enduring salience of 'gender expertise.'
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.021 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.092 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.021 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".